Products for cleaning hard surfaces are widely available on the market. These products are used for two purposes, the first being to clean soil from the surface and the second being to leave the surface with an aesthetically pleasing finish e.g. spot-free and/or shiny. However products available on the market often require rinsing with water after use. Typically when the water dries from the surface water-marks, smears or spots are left behind. These water-marks, it is believed may be due to the evaporation of water from the surface leaving behind deposits of minerals which were present as dissolved solids in the water, for example calcium or magnesium or sodium ions and salts thereof or may be deposits of water-carried soils, or even remnants from a cleaning product for example soap scum. One solution to this problem as provided in the prior art has been to clean the surface with a cleaning composition which modifies the surface to leave a hydrophobic finish. Thus during the cleaning process the majority of the water drains rapidly from the surface and the remainder forms discrete droplets or beads on the surface because of the hydrophobic interactions. However the Applicant has found that although the surface dries quickly, it is also left with noticeable spots or marks, known as water-marks. This problem is particularly apparent when cleaning ceramic, steel, plastic, glass or painted surfaces. A means of solving this problem, known in the art is to dry the surface using a cloth or chamois before the water-marks form. However this drying process is time consuming and requires considerable physical effort.
WO97/48927 describes a process for cleaning the exterior surface of a window using a spray gun and a means for preparing purified water. The windows are first cleaned with a cleaning composition and then rinsed with purified water. Whilst the use of this spray gun, may initially solve the problem of residual water marks on surfaces on drying, the Applicants have found that the spray gun has an inefficiently short life-span which thus requires the user to replace the ion-exchange resin cartridge after each use. Moreover the cleaning compositions described in WO97/48927 render the surfaces treated therewith, hydrophobic. It thus an object of the present invention, to provide a spraying device and container comprising a new purifier which has improved capacity versus the purifier described in WO97/48927.
In another aspect of the present invention the purifier is located inside the cavity of the container. In another aspect the container is suitable for attachment to a spray head to form the spraying device described in the present invention. The benefit in locating the purifier inside the container is in the ease of assembling the spraying device, allowing the user to quickly and accurately align the input and output ports of the purifier and the means for removing the cleaning compositions from the container, with the valve system in the spray head. A further benefit of locating the purifier inside the cavity of the container is that it can not be accessed by the user. The user is therefore discouraged from using the spraying device without also using the purifier, since this would lead to poor performance results. Moreover, since the purifier can not be regenerated, locating the purifier inside the container also ensures that the user replaces the purifier at the same time as he replaces the cleaning composition. For this reason the container comprising cleaning composition and the purifying device can then be made available as a combined recharge unit.
In another aspect of the present invention there is described a container suitable for use as a component of the spraying device comprises a purified and a composition capable of rendering the surface treated, hydrophilic. The Applicants have found that cleaning compositions which render the surface hydrophilic rather than hydrophobic provide improved cleaning performance, but can also be rinsed from the surface treated more easily.